CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?

no the subaltern may not speak.

pardon?

Beyond her critique of Deleuze and Foucault’s relationship to ideology and ideological production, Spivak finds their sense of “representation” to be problematic. In Deleuze’s pronouncement “a theory is like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier,” Spivak identifies an anxiousness about the relationship between “intellectual labor” and “manual labor,” and an attempt to collapse the two. Spivak thinks his earlier statement, “there is no more representation; there’s nothing but action” makes an “important point... the opposition between... theory and... practice is too quick and easy.” But even if this is a significant and possibly fruitful argument, Spivak tells us, Deleuze’s statement is “problematic,” specifically in his use of the word “representation.” In saying “there is no more representation,” Deleuze has allowed two senses of the word to become conflated. To articulate the two different senses, Spivak uses the German words Darstellung and Veretrung. Darstellung, “representation as ‘speaking-for,’” is the sort of representation present in the House of Representatives—it exists “within state-formation and the law.” Veretrung, on the other hand, is “representation as ‘re-presentation,’” and is the representation of “subject-formation” in art and philosophy. If there is no “representation,” the intellectual doesn’t “speak for the oppressed group,” and the subject is not a “representative consciousness” and therefore not undivided.

i need to get out of college

dishonorable discharge, soldier.

I'm definitely reminded why the hell I left.

i dont even know what that last sentence means.

(THE ANSWER IS "NO" BY THE WAY)

throw the word "subversive" in there somewhere and yr set

i actually like this essay!! i just dont want to write about it

i actually like this essay!! i just dont want to write about it

you've described my relationship to school perfectly.

& my relationship to writing

i don't get the last two sentences.

get bent & max: OTM. i have two more classes to go, and just today i found two really fucking cool subjects i can do - one of which is virtually HIDDEN in the course catalogue, and you'd never find it if someone didn't tell you about it (someone told me about it). now i don't have to do the buddhism class anymore.

luckily youre on strike remy!!

this particular essay never connected with me for some reason

Veretrung, on the other hand, is “representation as ‘re-presentation,’” and is the representation of “subject-formation” in art and philosophy.
^^^
this sentence just means that "veretrung" is what we might think of as "representation" in art; i.e., the (re-)presentation of another material thing

If there is no “representation,” the intellectual doesn’t “speak for the oppressed group,” and the subject is not a “representative consciousness” and therefore not undivided.
^^^
i dont know what this sentence means and i deleted it from my essay

this particular essay is correct but terribly written.

get an editor, Spivack!

prob b/c i got stuck on subaltern and how early 90s it seemed to me and could only think of it being a mix of pixies and nirvana or something
i'm ok now

"Can Mudhoney speak?"

i find this 'representation' to be 'problematic'

yeah horseshoe is right... shes so concerned with forestalling possible criticisms of the article that she buries all of her points and obfuscates what are mostly fairly cogent theses

You people are giving me flashbacks.

Ultimate 1993 grad school seminar experience -- trying to follow the softly-spoken professor's analysis of Nadine Gordimer while the Melvins are rampaging through a free noontime set not far away.

haha
you should just talk abt lollapalooza for 2000 words
xpost

the first time i heard the word obfuscate was in an episode of the x-files
scully said it, at the end

Although Spivak clearly finds the work of Soundgarden and Babes in Toyland important and useful in certain ways, she finds it deeply problematic in others. “The two systematically ignore,” she writes, “the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history.”

deny inveigle obfuscate!

i thought it was "obfusticate" until like two months ago

obfusticate=to make unclear by way of musty odor

confusticate

i think it remains the biggest word i've even heard on tv
xpostss

i know where this spivak essay is in my files and i am not going to get it; i just can't

we could talk about seeing and knowing instead
the speaking eye, the penetrating gaze

it's all connected to this anyway

i like this essay a lot b/c she defends derrida as a political thinker and identifies a lot of things that i really admire about "deconstructive" or at least derridean discourse

BUT I HOPE YOU ALL ARE VOTING

i am voting by not voting

"Can rrrobyn speak?"

i am working on an nu-power alphabet

spivak is so unreadable. i am fairly convinced that so much of US humanities theory coming from foucault/derrida/deleuze/cixous/kristeva has lost a LOT in translation of those writers

just find everything "problematic" and bonus points for making "problematic" a noun while you're at it. the age of theory is over.

Daria otm. I've tried to read Spivak too, but had to give it up. Though she's not as bad as Kristeva I guess. I really hate that French school of writers' way of making their texts into intellectual jigsaw puzzles. If you want to be subversive, don't you think it'd help if more than one person out of thousand would actually get what you're trying to say?

if the subaltern speaks in the public sphere does he/she make a sound??

You've been pwned by your sarcastic teacher: you have to go to his classes and he makes you write about the lower classes.

ohh man I remember reading this essay, wow it was bruuuuuuutal. I read it in a feminist philosophy class, and I think I enjoyed reading it at the time (the course as a whole was pretty interesting).

But now I think she could've probably sliced away at 80% of the convulated prose and gotten her point across a lot more clearly. I spent a fuckin' long time trying to get what the hell she was talking about, and I think I pretty much skimmed through that whole bit in the last third of the article when she talks about the British abolition of sati. Spivak is seriously a horrible, horrible writer.

Have you read her introduction to "Of Grammatology"? Even more poorly written and abstruse then this essay, and it's a toss-up whether it's more poorly written than "Of Grammatology." Errhhh I don't think I could ever arse myself to sit down and read this stuff again.

*convoluted, sorry.

and doesn't she say at the end that the Subaltern cannot speak?

is there a particular reason for going to those german terms? they ring a bell for some reason but i've forgotten it? is it mere caprice?

see, i could have changed my username to 'the subaltern' to be clever, under the old rules.

lol max u a fave man

is this some bullshit like, language is structured by the ruling class therefore to speak in language as we're given it is always to speak the language of power, and therefore for the subaltern to speak would involve using fucking joycean baby-talk bollocks?

i take back everything i said on this thread

tracer hand, what i mean is that i kind of see philosophers as working in similar ways as scientists do -- there are many individual researchers who make small, individual contributions to the solution of a set of widely recognized problems, that there is a sense of collective effort in the field -- each researcher makes tiny, precise, and careful contributions, not big sweeping solutions to "secrets of previously-locked mysteries"

not big sweeping solutions to "secrets of previously-locked mysteries"

^^ scientists do this, though

as do ordinary people on a pretty regular basis

talk to anyone who studies string theory, for example

Hey! Little Girl
Comb your hair, fix your makeup
Soon he will open the door
Don't think because there's a ring on your finger
You needn't try anymore

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I'm warning you...

Day after day
There are girls at the office
And men will always be men
Don't send him off with your hair still in curlers
You may not see him again

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
He's almost here...

Hey! Little girl
Better wear something pretty
Something you'd wear to go to the city and
Dim all the lights, pour the wine, start the music
Time to get ready for love
Time to get ready
Time to get ready for love

i mean the fact that you keep comparing derrida to scientists + philosophers (who you clump together) would seem to indicate some problems on the way

the problem with derrida is that mainstream academic philosophers aren't sure what to do with him at all, if they even read him. derrida is far more popular with english/lit crit professors than philosophers.

btw, the view that science & philosophy are intensely related is fairly widespread among mainstream analytic philosophers.

http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/479/490765/cover.gif

not big sweeping solutions to "secrets of previously-locked mysteries"

^^ scientists do this, though

the big-sweeping solutions in science are what we hear about in the news. there are like 100,000,000 tiny experiments going on right now trying to examine 100,000,000 tiny problems.

ok mark, but philosophers aren't each working on some small chunk of one agreed-upon thing, after which they can put down their pens and say "it is done", and especially not ppl like derrida -- i think this is what v4h1d referred to as the difference between analytical and continental styles of philosophizin'

the big-sweeping solutions in science are what we hear about in the news. there are like 100,000,000 tiny experiments going on right now trying to examine 100,000,000 tiny problems

false!

maybe you are confusing science and engineering?

what is false about that?

seems to hold true for medicine at least

more true in some fields than others. i'd say it's more true for biology and astronomy than physics and chemistry, for example.

well, here's an example. there's 1000s of high-energy particle physicists looking for data confirming the different predicted symmetries of particle emissions. myself, for example, in the late 90s. OK i guess that's 1000s of small experiments. but each experiment does NOT add incrementally to our understanding of quarks. one "new" result though (an asymmetry where we expected a symmetry) would have indicated a whole new pair of fundamental particles and greatly shook up the field all at once

(Not that I really want to join in, but it's probably worth noting that Derrida is surely the analog of "what we hear about in the news," and that there are 100,000,000 ten-page approaches to minor questions of philosophy published in minor academic journals ever year)

^^ also true

yes

I voted yes

i think this is what v4h1d referred to as the difference between analytical and continental styles of philosophizin'

you're right. i stated way upthread that i didn't want to get into any substantive statements about either approach, but that i simply thought that the argumentative approach in analytic phil is something that i came to admire when i was doing my philosophy degree. i didn't find that derrida's writing style was at all expressive of what i admired about good philosophy writing, that's really about it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lolololololol

hahaha

lol! xp

who said dualism was dead

(i love that i stay off ilx almost all day to edit thesis and when i come back on this thred is at the top of new answers and i am all loopy on poststructuralism lolz)

Loopy on Poststructuralism will either have to be the name of your blog or your first album.

but i already promised that once i submit this thing i will never say/write poststructuralism again

loopy on p*sts***tur**is*
loopy on the concept of freedom in the v narrow and timely definition of one robynf, dec '07

loooooooooooooooool

This was a good thread!

haha

CAN THE SUBALTERN USE TWITTER

― El Tomboto, Friday, November 2, 2007 2:15 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this was never properly answered

wkiw spivak

I would actually be k'ing-iw spivak next week, along with kaja silverman and a bunch of canadian public intellectuals (they're coming to this meeting for a humanities institute I did a fellowship with) but no, I had to go and move to a different continent...

i took several classes with kaja's ex! the mean-spirited gossip at the time was that he hadn't written a thing since they'd split up (i.e. all the ideas were hers)

Thanks are in order to this thread, which has inspired me to gratuitously throw this phrase into Phd application statements.

DOES THE SUBALTERN WANT A CUP OF TEA?

DOES THE SUBALTERN TAKE SUGAR surely

CAN THE SUBALTERN GET ME DOCTORAL FUNDING?

this particular essay is correct but terribly written.

― horseshoe, Friday, 2 November 2007 04:37 (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

get an editor, Spivack!

― horseshoe, Friday, 2 November 2007 04:37 (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i love how she writes. i have long running feud w my friend ellen about her critique of deleuze in this essay. this is the part im fuzziest on but im p sure ellen is wrong.

CAN THE SUBALTERN KICK IT?

this is an entirely different question.

i feel bad i misspelled her name, but her writing still annoys me. it's been years since i read this, though.

does the subaltern have to lie to kick it?

the subaltern is always already kicking it

can the subaltern freak?

i don't know anything about this stuff, but i just listened to the in our time about the "analytic-continental split" and enjoyed it!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016x2jp

Beatrice Han-Pile, who seemed to be there to rep for continental, was in particular extremely clear to me (clearer than the analytical guy!)

the subaltern can speak.

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-speak/

this was pretty interesting